Originally on Substack
My favorite 80,000 Hours episodes
I’ve been listening to the 80,000 Hours Podcast pretty regularly since 2018 and I’m closing in on having listened to every episode. This is a list of the episodes that are especially great and worth listening to if you’re interested in the topic.
Top 10 favorites
These are my favorites because they’re insanely interesting to listen to, not necessarily because they’re the absolute most informative or useful. Sorted newest to oldest.
#152 – Joe Carlsmith on navigating serious philosophical confusion
#145 – Christopher Brown on why slavery abolition wasn't inevitable
#115 – David Wallace on the many-worlds theory of quantum mechanics and its implications
#102 – Tom Moynihan on why prior generations missed some of the biggest priorities of all
#100 – Having a successful career with depression, anxiety and imposter syndrome
#86 – Hilary Greaves on Pascal's mugging, strong longtermism, and whether existing can be good for us
#83 - Jennifer Doleac on preventing crime without police and prisons
#45 - Tyler Cowen's case for maximising econ growth, stabilising civilization & thinking long-term
#35 - Tara Mac Aulay on the audacity to fix the world without asking permission
All other standouts
#187 - Zach Weinersmith on how researching his book turned him from a space optimist into a “space bastard”
#180 - Hugo Mercier on why gullibility and misinformation are overrated
#175 - Lucia Coulter on preventing lead poisoning for $1.66 per child
#156 - Markus Anderljung on how to regulate cutting-edge AI models
#142 - John McWhorter on key lessons from linguistics, the virtue of creoles, and language extinction
#155 - Lennart Heim on the compute governance era and what has to come after
#116 - Luisa Rodriguez on why global catastrophes seem unlikely to kill us all
#112 - Carl Shulman on the common-sense case for existential risk work and its practical implications
#111 - Mushtaq Khan on using institutional economics to predict effective government reforms
#110 - Holden Karnofsky on building aptitudes and kicking ass
#105 - Alexander Berger on improving global health and wellbeing in clear and direct ways
#103 - Max Roser on building the world's best source of COVID-19 data at Our World in Data
#90 - Ajeya Cotra on worldview diversification and how big the future could be
#81 - Ben Garfinkel on scrutinising classic AI risk arguments
#69 - Jeff Ding on China, its AI dream, and what we get wrong about both
#67 - David Chalmers on the nature and ethics of consciousness
#62 - Paul Christiano on messaging the future, increasing compute, & how CO2 impacts your brain
#61 - Helen Toner on emerging technology, national security, and China
#60 - Phil Tetlock on why accurate forecasting matters for everything, and how you can do it better
#53 - Kelsey Piper on the room for important advocacy within journalism
#46 - Hilary Greaves on moral cluelessness & tackling crucial questions in academia
#44 - Paul Christiano on how we'll hand the future off to AI, & solving the alignment problem
#42 - Amanda Askell on moral empathy, the value of information & the ethics of infinity
#21 - Holden Karnofsky on times philanthropy transformed the world & Open Phil’s plan to do the same
#16 - Michelle Hutchinson on global priorities research & shaping the ideas of intellectuals
#15 - Phil Tetlock on how chimps beat Berkeley undergrads and when it’s wise to defer to the wise